“The big problem was that we felt we couldn’t play music whenever we wanted,” Winwood says. In doing so they set the trend for bands suddenly upping sticks and ‘getting it together in the country’. The four-piece shifted around various bases in London before finally taking up residence in a remote cottage in Aston Tirrold, deep in rural Berkshire. The Spencer Davis Group outside the pop music TV show Ready Steady Go! studios in Wembley in the 60s: (l-r) Pete York, Muff Winwood, Spencer Davis, Steve Winwood (Image credit: Getty Images)Īs it transpired, Winwood elected to form Traffic with three long‑time friends from the Midlands R&B scene – Jim Capaldi, Dave Mason and Chris Wood. After that point occurred, though, then yes, I would certainly have taken the job.” “There came a point in the Spencer Davis Group where I thought: ‘I’ve definitely had enough of this, I want to do something else.’ But I’m not quite sure whether that occurred before Cream or not, or if I was in that mind-set. “There was a slight lack of synchronisation in the timing of things,” says Winwood, musing on what might have been. Clapton was outvoted, of course, but it’s tempting to imagine how Cream might have developed with Winwood also in the band. Eric Clapton had originally envisioned the band as a quartet, with Winwood out front, although both Jack Bruce and Baker favoured a trio set-up. Not long after the Spencer Davis Group had scored their second UK chart-topping 45 with Somebody Help Me, Ginger Baker was putting Cream together. Had the planets aligned a little differently, Winwood’s musical life may have taken a whole other turn in 1966. That was pretty unsustainable and I was kicked out of school.” I’d get home at one in the morning, then have to go to school that day. Then on the Sunday the same promoter had a club in Hanley, called The Place, and we’d play that. “At fifteen I’d be going up to play all-nighters at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, finishing at five or six in the morning. “I’m afraid it has to be said that I never had a proper job,” Winwood says. Life as a touring musician soon took precedence over everything else. And by not being able to emulate that stuff accurately or faithfully, we were inadvertently creating our own style.” “They were singing in a form of English and a lot of the time I didn’t understand what they were talking about, like ‘another mule kicking in your stall’. “With Spencer Davis we were discovering blues and R&B, all this fantastic music we were hearing from America,” says Steve. Before long they’d secured a weekly residency at the Golden Eagle, and soon attracted a BBC crew to film the queues around the block. With Muff also on board as bassist, alongside drummer Pete York, the quartet started working up tunes by Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie. I asked him if he’d like to be in the band and, in a lovely little Birmingham accent, he went: ‘I’d love to, but I don’t have a driving licence.’ I told him I’d come and get him, because I had a beaten-up old Bradford, which I’d paid fifty quid for.” “I walked in and there was this kid, pretty much not long out of short trousers, who played piano like Oscar Peterson and sang like Ray Charles. “They were playing a form of music that was a step up from traditional or New Orleans jazz,” he recalls today. Looking to put his own group together, Spencer Davis caught them one night. Stevie became a regular on the Midlands R&B scene in his early teens, before he and his sibling formed the Muff-Woody Jazz Band. He was eight when he made his stage debut, playing in the same band as his father, a semi-pro musician, and elder brother Muff. Growing up in the Great Barr area of Birmingham, Winwood might easily have followed his father into the family’s local foundry business. Blind Faith in 1969: (l-r) Steve Winwood, Ric Grech, Ginger Baker, Eric Clapton (Image credit: Getty Images)
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